Friday, January 16, 2009

What You Can Do To Improve Your Search Engine Rankings Externally

By Chris Channing

There has been quite the buzz around search engine optimization lately, and with good cause. The right optimization efforts will give businesses or services the exposure they need to continue operating- and likewise, they'll need to ensure their optimization is up to par. To do the job externally, there are a few tips to follow.

Anyone can post a link on a random website and say they have gained a link. But in reality, this may not be the case. Search engines have a value system that determines the credibility of different websites. News resource CNN, for instance, has a high credibility- while a personal blog might not have such credibility to pass onto websites it links to, depending on the blog.

One of the more popular ways to obtain links is to pay for them. Keep in mind that this could actual deter rankings, as Google has been stated as saying that buying links is prohibited and that offenders may lose ranking in their search results. Those who buy links in unnatural ways should do so at their own risk, and be prepared to face the consequences should there be any.

The way search engines prefer to have webmasters build links is through natural exposure- such as social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is the action of saving a website in order to read it later or have easy access to it. Websites that have many bookmarks are deemed to be more worthy of ranking, and search engines will surely take notice of such things.

Related to social bookmarking is website networks. A network of websites is basically a link exchange among like-minded webmasters who have similar websites. This was more common in the past when search engines were less dominant, but still serves as a good way to build relevant links. Joining a health network, for example, may include emailing a similar health website and asking for a link exchange to pool resources together for readers.

Article syndication is perhaps one of the more popular methods of obtaining links from other websites. By writing a unique article and tagging a few links in it, a webmaster can submit the article to a directory and wait for it to be published for free links. This process takes some effort, but it helps greatly in obtaining relevant links to a certain website or page- and Google seems to be just fine with this practice as no reported penalties have come to light.

Closing Comments

The best advice would be to pick up more experience in SEO by going through the motions and setting up experiments to find out the information straight from the horse's mouth. Also consider outsourcing one's work to professional SEO businesses if one gets in over his or her head- it'll save some time and maybe even some money. - 16463